Beauty, Mercy, Justice

Fake Green

“Just a few years ago, the term “green economy” referred to economies that are locally based, climate friendly, and low-impact. But since the global economic meltdown began in 2007, the green economy has come to mean something more akin to the wholesale privatization of nature. This green economy is about putting a price on natural cycles through a controversial set of policies called “Payments for Ecosystem Services”—an approach to greening capitalism that some liken to a tiger claiming to turn vegetarian.

Rather than reducing pollution and consumption, protecting the territorial rights of land-based peoples, and promoting local initiatives that steward resources for future generations, the approach is doing the opposite: promoting monoculture tree plantations, trade in pollution credits, and the establishment of speculative markets in biodiversity and forests, all of which threaten to displace land-based communities.

A report by Ecosystem Marketplace, the leading purveyor of ‘Payments for Ecosystem Services,’ lays out the green economy argument: ‘Ecosystems provide trillions of dollars in clean water, flood protection, fertile lands, clean air, pollination, disease control. … So how do we secure this enormously valuable infrastructure and its services? The same way we would electricity, potable water, or natural gas. We pay for it.’

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), among the chief proponents of the green economy, says this approach will result in ‘improved well-being and social equity while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities.’ The World Bank, also promoting the green economy, says, ‘Natural capital accounting would add to our national GDPs the wealth stored in our natural resources: minerals before they are mined, forests before they are felled, water while it is still in the rivers.’

But, for social movements, land-based communities, and indigenous peoples, the question is, who really pays? For what are they paying? And, most poignantly, since when has nature, the source of all life, been reduced to a service-provider?

One concern is that this new green economy is a form of ‘disaster capitalism’—a global effort to put the ‘services’ of nature into the same hands that caused the global financial meltdown. And that seems like a very, very bad idea.”

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Well… If you create a “green economy” project only to monetize that will be the obvious result, as you’ll do the cheapest thing that gets you the money.

But, if you’re doing a real restoration/conservation work, and then gets the chance of being paid for the “Ecosystem Services”, why not?

(On the case I’m thinking of, there is a big water works planned, that could mitigate the floodings that each year destroy roads, fields, and so on. It’s not being done to get money, but because it is good for the people doing it. But as it helps others it’s reasonable that they pay too.

Or the case when somebody owns a forest. Keeping the forest intact makes bad economy sense. He incurs on a opportunity cost by not cutting it. It makes sense that the people who benefits from the uncut forest pays for that.)

How about letting him keep whatever he can physically fell himself, by chainsaw even?

And why should he own a forest in the first place? In what way do we benefit from his claim to ownership of a forest? I understand how it benefited us when the King owned a forest.

So some schmoe claims he owns all these trees, and the dirt they grow from, and since the rest of humanity likes breathing clean air, we ought to pay him for ‘his’ trees?

Did he plant this forest? In what way does he actually work this forest? Does he gather and sell firewood? Because otherwise, it sounds like you want us to pay a dude with a piece of paper not to come in and denude what is our common heritage.

Owning a forest! You guys have come up with some wacky abstractions, but that one takes the cake.

On modern societies you can be the owner of any plot of land. If that land happens to be forested, you own the forest.

And there is an opportunity cost on keeping the forest. If you cut it you can sow maize and get a profit. So by not cutting it you are incurring a cost. And the benefits of not cutting it usually are usually got by other people. So that other people should share the cost.